Pizza generally comprises a sheet of leavened dough, baked with a topping including one or more of tomato sauce, cheese, seasoning, oil, vegetable, meat, etc. Frozen pizzas are popular ready-to-prepare food products which conveniently may be eaten after a brief heating period performed by microwave heating and/or oven baking. In high volume production of frozen pizzas, pizza crusts are formed from dough, then chilled for freshness in an unbaked or partially-baked (par-baked) condition, then transported to a topping dispenser to receive topping materials before packaging and distribution.
Mechanized conveying systems have been used in part to transport untopped pizza crusts as individual units from crust making operations to topping dispensing operations at a manufacturing facility. However, manual labor has been relied upon to facilitate and monitor the handling and transport of the pizza crusts. Pizza crusts may be handled as individual units after crust formation until topped, or accumulated in stack form one or more times before the pizza crusts are fed to a topping dispenser. Stacking the pizza crusts helps to ensure an ample supply close to downstream topping operations. Preferably, pizza crusts would be individually feedable from a supply stack on demand to supply a topping dispenser or other downstream processing station in a uniform, non-interrupted manner.
In the past, significant manual labor required to un-stack and singulate the crusts. It is, of course, undesirable for the structure or appearance of the crusts to be damaged during handling, and care must therefore be taken to avoid damaging the crusts as by excessive distortion or creation of significant discontinuities Pizza crusts that have been stacked have a tendency to adhere to each other, requiring controlled manipulations to separate adjoining crusts without damaging them. Substantial manual labor has been employed to transfer loose crusts from a stack to or singulated crusts from the bakery to a conveyor or other transport system used to advance the crusts towards a topping station or other processing station designed for throughput of singulated crusts.
There is a need for labor-saving automated systems for handling and transporting pizza crusts or other stackable food products especially in food processing environments between formation and downstream production operations.